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Kali Malone

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Kali Malone, “Does Spring Hide Its Joy” (Ideologic Organ, 2023)

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This latest release from this eternally innovative Stockholm-based composer is a durational tour de force that first began to take shape in empty Berlin concert halls in the early months of the pandemic. While I note with grim humor that the pandemic has itself become an endlessly shifting durational tour de force, Malone’s primary inspiration came instead from the ambient sense of unreality and distorted time that became pervasive as the fabric of normal daily life quickly unraveled. Like many other artists, Malone suddenly found herself with plenty of free time during that period of dread, isolation, and uncertainty, yet she was fortunate enough to get an invitation to record new music at Berlin’s Funkhaus and MONOM and even luckier still to have some extremely talented friends around with newly open schedules themselves. 

In short, the stars were in perfect alignment for one hell of an avant-drone dream team to form, as Malone (armed with 72 sine wave oscillators) tapped in like-minded souls Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton and the expected slow-burning dark sorcery ensued. Does Spring Hide Its Joy feels like an inspired twist on the longform drone majesty of artists like Éliane Radigue, as Malone employed just intonation to layer complex and otherworldly harmonies while her collaborators gamely helped ensure that the crescendos were visceral, gnarled and snarling enough to leave a deep impression.

I have no doubt at all that Kali Malone brought her usual compositional rigor to this “study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns,” but Does Spring Hide Its Joy is more open-ended than her usual fare and leaves some welcome room for spontaneity and improvisation. Malone envisioned the piece as a puzzle of sorts that is assembled from five-minute blocks approximating a ladder that the musicians can choose to ascend or descend. The total number of blocks is fluid as well. For example, the album versions of the piece are an hour long while the live version can sometimes stretch to 90 minutes (note: the CD includes three performances of the piece while the LP includes only two). 

On top of that inventive structure, Malone deliberately wrote the piece with her collaborators’ styles and techniques in mind, envisioning the composition as a “framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement.” In practical terms, that means that this piece is essentially a drone fantasia of bowed strings, smoldering distortion, and shifting harmonies that occasionally blossoms into something more fiery and transcendent. This being a Kali Malone composition, however, the organically evolving harmonies and oscillations are invariably absorbing, sophisticated, and distinctive regardless of the shape the piece takes. Notably, this album is also a bit more earthy, psychotropic and texturally varied than previous Malone opuses. It feels akin to a ghostly ballet or hallucinatory tendrils of smoke, as the sustained tones of the three players languorously intertwine and dissipate in a dreamlike haze of lingering feedback, overtones, and harmonics.

Given the inherently fluidity of that compositional approach, the album’s two or three pieces are essentially variations upon the same theme and the differences between the individual discs or LPs are largely irrelevant. They each unfold differently, of course, but they are essentially the same elements combining at different times (somewhat akin to out-of-phase tape loops). That said, there is an unconventional arc of sorts, as the drones tend to boil over into churning and howling intensity with increased frequency as each part creeps into its second and third movements (though those delineations would be hard to notice without a numbered track list as a reference). 

That said, Does Spring Hide Its Joy feels more akin to watching slow-motion footage of a storm forming at sea than it does a planned composition, as terms like “beginning” or “end” lose all meaning: elemental forces simply gather and dissipate at their own pace and occasionally there are metaphorical flashes of lightning or masses of dark clouds. That fundamentally unpredictability makes for an impressively absorbing listening experience, as each new harmonic development could potentially be the early stages of a howling tempest.

Obviously, experiencing the slow-motion massing of Malone’s otherworldly harmonic clouds right from the beginning is the probably the best way to appreciate the eerie beauty of this album, but Spring is also the sort of piece in which I could drop into its shifting currents at nearly any point and find myself quickly entranced in medias res. That unusual feature did not elude Malone, unsurprisingly, as there is also an installation version of the piece that is coupled with video work from Nika Milano. I am sure I would absolutely love that, as it is doubly immersive to have a cool visual accompaniment while I dissolve into oceanic harmonic bliss, yet Spring is a mesmerizing experience as a stand-alone album too. 

As was the case with previous Malone classics like The Sacrificial Code, what I get out of this album depends largely upon what I put in: deep listening brings deep rewards. My gut feeling is that Spring is destined to topple that previous masterpiece as my personal favorite Malone album, as it is every bit as sophisticated as its predecessor yet has more bite and spontaneity. Then again, maybe I will conclude that I prefer the more focused and minimal pleasures of Malone by herself at a pipe organ. They both have their place, certainly (that place being “heavy rotation”). Regardless of where Spring ultimately lands in my personal Kali Malone canon, I have no hesitation at all about proclaiming this to be yet another brilliant and fascinating statement from an artist on quite an impressive hot streak.

Listen here.

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Kali Malone, “Living Torch” (Portraits GRM, 2022)

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This long-awaited follow up to Malone’s 2019 cult masterpiece The Sacrificial Code is an unexpected blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar, as the Stockholm-based composer trades in her now signature pipe organ for “a complex electroacoustic ensemble.” While that new approach certainly features an ambitiously expanded instrumental palette (trombone, bass clarinet, boîte à bourdon. sinewave generator, and ARP 2500 synth), Living Torch is still instantly recognizable as Malone’s work both stylistically and structurally.

Notably, the piece was “commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra,” which makes a lot of sense in hindsight, as Living Torch sometimes improbably feels like the work of a drone-obsessed medieval organist who somehow managed to get ahold of Sunn O)))’s gear and some ancient battle horns. Given those enhancements, Living Torch can reasonably be described as a more conspicuously doom-inspired release than The Sacrificial Code. Admittedly, that takes this particular album a bit out of my own personal comfort zone, but I love it anyway and remain firm in my belief that Malone is one of the most singular and fascinating composers of her generation.

This piece, which is split into two parts to accommodate the vinyl format, premiered in “complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist.” I imagine it was quite an immersive and amazing performance for those lucky enough to be in attendance, yet I suspect my home-listening experience is but a pale shadow of the intended one, as my sound system falls a bit short of the GRM’s Francois Bayle-designed Acousmonium (a “utopia devoted to pure listening”). Given that the loudspeaker orchestra’s entire raison d’etre is to facilitate “immersion” and “spatialized polyphony,” I cannot think of a more deserving commission recipient than Malone, as few contemporarily composers are more devoted to understanding and maximizing the physics of sound than Malone.

In fact, I suspect there is at least one notebook packed with details about how the various frequencies of the shifting sustained tones interact to create a vibrant host of intentional overtones and oscillations. There are a number of other intriguing and cerebral things colliding here as well, as Living Torch draws from “multiple lineages including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète” and also explores “justly tuned harmony,” “canonic structures,” “the polyphony of unique timbres,” “the scaling of dynamic range,” and “the revelation of sound qualities.” Admittedly, I will just have to take Malone’s word for some of that, but I can definitely appreciate the endlessly shifting, slow-motion beauty of the finished piece.

The album’s first half opens with the expected foundation of slow-motion drones, throbbing bass tones, and subtly shifting oscillations, but soon heads into terrain that feels like some kind of majestic post-battle elegy from centuries past. As with all Malone releases, however, much of the magic lies in the textures and subtle transformations and how much I get out of the piece depends a lot on how closely I listen to the details. As it unfolds further, the piece gradually blossoms into something like a slowly seething psychedelic cloud or a series of deep cosmic exhalations centered around a quietly flickering and undulating central chord.

The album’s second half basically picks up right where the first half left off, but the addition of a subtle, minor key bass pattern makes it feel like an especially blackened, slow-motion strain of post-rock. It does not take long before it becomes something more gnarled, seething, and distorted though. While I realize that Malone is originally from Colorado, it is clear that she has been living in Scandinavia long enough for black metal to become part of her DNA, as much of Living Torch‘s second act evokes a scene akin to black smoke lazily curling over the smoldering remnants of a torched cathedral as the final rays of a blood red sunset fade in the background. Similar to my imagined sunset, many of the drones fade away in the piece’s final moment to reveal a tender, hauntingly beautiful closing passage.

That last bit provides a satisfying (if understated) pay off, which I very much appreciate, but the entire piece is a sustained illustration of why Kali Malone is so wonderful and singular, as her control, patience, and attention to detail are unparalleled and her vision is uniquely her own. Tentatively, I still think I prefer The Sacrificial Code, but this one seems to be growing on me more with each listen and I am increasingly convinced that Malone is some kind of formidable new half-sorceress/half-architect breed of electroacoustic composer.

Listen here.

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Kali Malone, “The Sacrificial Code” (iDEAL, 2019)

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I was recently very surprised to discover that Kali Malone is from Colorado, as she has been quite an uncannily ubiquitous and quietly influential presence in European experimental music circles over the last couple of years. That role is especially remarkable given how her solo work increasingly sounds like it could have been composed a few hundred years ago (a direction largely rooted in a fateful meeting with an organ tuner). This latest release is the culmination of Malone’s recent passion for pipe organs, following in the wake of last year’s
brief yet excellent Organ Dirges 2016-2017 EP (Ascetic House). 

The two releases are quite similar aesthetically, as Malone remains quite found of slow-moving and meditatively drone-like compositions, but The Sacrificial Code is simultaneously simpler and more ambitious than its concise predecessor. In fact, this sprawling double album of organ works is an absolutely monolithic statement (and a fitfully mesmerizing one at that). To my ears, it admittedly errs a bit on the side of overwhelming, but The Sacrificial Code is probably exactly the album that longtime fans were hoping Malone would someday release.

Kali Malone’s brief career has been quite an improbable and interesting series of bold decisions and chance meetings. The most significant event, however, was her decision to move to Sweden as a teenager soon after meeting Ellen Arkbro at a show in NYC. Once there, Malone was quickly won over by thriving artist communities like Fylkingen and resources like Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) and threw herself wholeheartedly into carving out her own role. In fact, I knew about the label that Malone co-founded (XKatedral) months before I even knew anything about her own work. Also of note: Malone was a classically trained vocalist and sometimes guitarist before switching hemispheres, but she has since become known primarily as a synth and organ composer (though her early tapes still feature some guitar). 

In keeping with that inscrutable and enigmatic trajectory, her first album was composed for an unconventional string ensemble enhanced by gongs, sine waves, and tapes. Consequently, it is fair to say that each new Kali Malone release is kind of a surprise, as she seems to be in a continual state of restless evolution and reinvention. There is one notable constant though: Malone is extremely interested in unusual and precise tunings and that goes a long way towards explaining how she wound up making an album like The Sacrificial Code.  If she used an unusual tuning for this particular album, she kept it to herself, but she is an apprentice organ tuner who has employed Just Intonation in the past (and her 2016 collaboration with Caterina Barbieri & Ellen Arkbro was composed for guitars “united in the pythagorean and septimal region of the harmonic spectrum.” 

In short, Malone is an artist with a deep understanding of how frequencies interact. When I listen to The Sacrificial Code casually, however, it sounds like a very straightforward (if anachronistic) album of simple organ hymns. In fact, there is almost nothing on this release that would sound at all out of place at an organ mass at a normal Catholic church, which makes it a bizarrely backwards-looking and traditional album on its face. It is hard to say how much of that elegiac and “religious” tone was intended and how much of it stems from the constraints of Malone’s chosen instrument and the features that led her to choose it in the first place. The song titles certainly suggest the former was a significant force, but Malone was more explicit in her intention to “flow against the grain of the prevailing musical hegemony.”

For one, she purposely close-mic’d the organ to eliminate natural reverb. Also, she notes that the pieces were “compositionally stripped of gestural adornments and spontaneous expressive impulse” and that she was
attempting to achieve “transcendence through self-restraint.” That rigorously restrained and stripped-down approach is the big caveat with The Sacrificial Code, as many of Malone’s compositions are too austere to make a strong impression melodically, though the intertwined and ascending themes of the title piece are quite lovely, as are some of the rich harmonies of “Litanic Cloth Wrung.” Also, the album is padded out a bit with live versions of “The Sacrificial Code” and two pieces from Organ Dirges. All of that suggests that Malone hubristically attempted to stretch a modest batch of good ideas across four full sides of vinyl (or three CDs), but my opinion changed dramatically when I listened to the album on headphones: The Sacrificial Code is essentially two very different albums masquerading as just one. 

On an overt level, it is a likably meditative (if unremarkable) suite of minimalist organ hymns, but closer listening reveals a stealthily concealed noise/sound art album hiding amidst the sustained drones and overlapping harmonies. The latter is what makes this album a fascinating achievement, as Malone cultivates a complex and vibrantly shifting feast of oscillations that puts her in roughly the same league as folks like Eliane Radigue and Catherine Christer Hennix. While I now mostly view the melodies and chord progressions
as a devious smoke screen that distracts from the real action in the details, I am quite struck by how seamlessly and ingeniously Malone was able to achieve two very different ends at once: she sneakily made a fine experimental music album, yet also made a bold conceptual statement about the value of simplicity and directness.

Viewed in that light, almost everything about The Sacrificial Code makes perfect sense and leads me to believe that Kali Malone might be some kind of visionary or genius (albeit one who is very prone to understatement and subtlety). I still think the album is overlong, but the lesser pieces became considerably more compelling once I grasped that everything Malone played was likely chosen to feed the cloud of overtones and oscillations that remained in its wake. The overall effect is akin to gazing at a pleasing painting, then looking at an X-ray of the same painting and being utterly dazzled by the depth and intricacy of a completely different image hiding behind the surface. 

Needless to say, that is quite a cool trick and I cannot think of any other artist who has done it this skillfully. As such, The Sacrificial Code occupies a curious place for me, as it is an imperfect album that is nevertheless a perfect and powerful statement of intent. If I had never heard it, I would probably still be following Malone’s career and occasionally enjoying an album or two, but this album is the one that finally awakened my ears to the frequency sorcery that is the true heart of her work. I suppose that makes The Sacrificial Code a landmark album of sorts, as it is a high profile release that will likely draw in a lot of curious new listeners and it captures Malone at her most focused and aesthetically distinctive. If those new listeners take the time to get attuned to Malone’s frequency, they will not be disappointed: The Sacrificial Code is strong evidence that Kali Malone is one of the most promising and inventive composers of her generation.

Listen here.